Eight months previously I met Margaret
Lantis, a highly respected Arctic anthropologist who had recently returned from
a trip to Alaska for the U.S. Public Health Service. Fascinated by the account
of her experience, I told her of my long-term desire to learn about the North
and its people. Did she have any suggestions? Would she help?

After obtaining a small research
grant, I followed her suggestion that I spend the summer at Kaktovik, a small
village on Barter Island that she had visited briefly. She was especially struck
by the people she had met there and how well they were responding to the rapid
changes occurring in the area. Kaktovik [or Qaaktugvik, "seining place"],
as I soon learned from a circumpolar map, was the most geographically isolated
of all Alaska's Iñupiat villages. For most of its existence, it had not
been so much a permanent settlement as a seasonal home for semi-nomadic hunting
families who depended on sea mammals, caribou and fowl for their sustenance.
Before commercial whaling arrived in the Beaufort Sea, the isolation of the
region had kept the people from having any significant contact with the outside
world. Indeed, prior to the arrival of the whalers, few Kaktovik Iñupiat
had ever seen a tanik [White man] in the area.

Then, in the early 1920s, a White
trader, Tom Gordon, opened a trading post on the western side of Barter Island.
This event provided an opportunity for the people of Kaktovik and the surrounding
area to exchange trapped furs for needed items of western manufacture. Aside
from Tom Gordon and a few other traders who settled along the coast at this
time, the only significant contacts these Iñupiat had with Whites came
from occasional visits by explorers, scientists, or Presbyterian missionaries
making their way from Barrow to Demarcation Point and Canadian settlements further
to the east. Then, following the plunge in fur prices caused by the depression
of the early 1930s, Gordon and the few other traders left for Barrow or Hershel
Island in Canada - followed in most instances by the still semi-nomadic Iñupiat.

After World War II and the initiation
of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the American
Arctic became increasingly militarized. Although the Iñupiat in the region
had gained some familiarity with the U.S. military during the war as a result
of Lt. Col. Marvin "Muktuk" Marston's "Tundra Army" of Alaska Territorial Guard,
they were hardly prepared for the events that followed. In July of 1947, a construction
company arrived at Kaktovik to build an airstrip for the military. This effort
turned out to be the first step in what eventually became the North American
Strategic Hemispheric Defence Plan to establish a Distant Early Warning [DEW-line]
radar network throughout the north from Barrow to Baffin Island in the Canadian
Archipelago.

Four years later, the U.S. Department
of the Interior authorized the Air Force to assume control over the 4500 acres
of Barter Island, including the site and cemetary of Kaktovik village. Shortly
thereafter, a secret Defense Department plan to construct an experimental radar
line from Barrow to Kaktovik was implemented. By the summer of 1953, large amounts
of equipment were stored on the Island. Unfortunately for the local residents,
the Air Force also decided to expand the air strip along the sand spit sheltering
Kaktovik Lagoon and build their hanger on the site of the village. Informed
by the military that they had to relocate immediately, the local Iñupiat
were stunned. Moving equipment and skilled operators were provided by the Air
Force, but the labor came mainly from the people. Soon, bulldozers had pushed
the remnants of a dozen sod and driftwood houses 1650 yards up the sand spit
to the relocated village site. Loss of their homes and personal possessions,
along with the destruction of valuable ice-cellars used for food storage brought
an angered response. But given the people's lack of English-speaking skills,
confusion over what was happening, and minimum contact with the outside world,
little effective protest was mounted.

Eventually houses were rebuilt and
ice cellars dug, most of the materials for the former having been offered by
the military or obtained from the refuse dump located at the end of the sand
spit. Relations between the villagers and the newcomers improved, and by 1957,
when the initial radar installation was complete, Iñupiat from Kaktovik,
Barrow and other North Slope villages obtained employment as construction workers
and maintenance personnel. In a little over a decade, a dramatic transformation
had occurred in the lives of the people. What had been the impact of these changes?
What was the village like now? These were the kinds of questions I wished to
explore.